The Story of the World — An Interactive History Timeline

History makes so much more sense when you can see it. Not a list of dates to memorise, but one long line you can travel along — where the pyramids come before the Romans, the Romans come before knights and castles, and the moon landing is surprisingly, dizzyingly recent.

So here’s the whole human story on a single line: from the first humans in Africa, right through to the world you’re living in now. Scroll along it, and hover (or tap) any moment to find out what happened and why it mattered.

Tap Open full-screen to give it the whole window.

Why a timeline helps

Kids often meet history in pieces — Egypt one year, the Romans another, the World Wars later on — and never quite see how the pieces connect. A single timeline puts them in order and in proportion, so the big questions become obvious:

• What came first? Were the Egyptians building pyramids before or after Ancient Greece? (Long before.)
• How recent is “modern”? Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years — but phones, planes and the internet are all just the last blink of it.
• What was happening elsewhere? While Europe was in the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was in a golden age of science, and the Maya were building cities in the Americas.

Turn it into a lesson

• Travel the line. Start at the beginning and scroll to the end — just reading the pictures and dates tells the story before you open a single detail.
• Play “before or after?” Pick two events and guess which came first, then check on the timeline.
• Zoom in. Land on any moment that sparks curiosity — the Mongol Empire, the printing press, the Space Age — and let it lead to a deeper dive.

This is a starting map, not the whole territory — every one of these moments is a whole world to explore. It’s built to give the big picture first, so the details have somewhere to hang.